Women in Wealth: On Both Sides of the Table
Some years ago, I sat with a couple to discuss a company the wife owned outright. Within minutes the conversation had drifted, without anyone meaning it to, toward her husband. He answered for her, and she let him. None of us thought it strange. That was simply how the room worked.
I have thought about that afternoon often, because the room works differently now. Two things changed at once. The woman is increasingly the sole person I am there to advise. And the one advising her is as likely now to be a woman as a man. The table has changed on both sides.
The change on the client’s side has been building for years, further than most balance sheets show. Women run the businesses now. They take charge of divisions and hold shares in their own names. They decide where the capital goes. Daughters join the company as operators and successors, wives and mothers have a hand in the decisions that set its direction. For a long time, a woman’s involvement was welcome in some parts of the picture and quietly
kept from others. She might run the foundation or build the art collection. The working decisions, the capital deployed, the deal taken or declined, were usually settled without her. That is no longer the case. Increasingly, she is the one making the call. One woman I advise runs her family’s second-largest company. Not long ago she decided to
sell a division it had held for years, after reading the numbers more coldly than anyone before her had. She discussed it with her father, signed, and moved on to the next matter. Nobody present treated it as an event. An ordinary morning’s work.
When women step into these decisions, they rarely doubt that they can handle the money. Most have looked after a good deal of it already, in the parts of life that go unrecorded. The 2 real question is whether the responsibility is formally theirs. Once it is, any lingering hesitation vanishes. Confidence tends to follow responsibility, not precede it. And so, a business has always leaned on its women. What has changed is that the paper now reflects it. The other side of the table has moved just as far. Recently, I sat with a family to discuss succession. What began as a conversation about ownership became a conversation about governance. The son and daughter wanted clarity on how major decisions would be made; the mother wanted a voice in questions she had long helped shape informally. We spent less time dividing assets than defining responsibilities. A generation ago, that would have been considered a different subject altogether.
Advice was once a narrower thing; the room broadened, and the work broadened with it. When I began, this work was almost entirely male: men advising men. It is far less so now. The questions we take as ours to ask are larger. Who is truly ready for what they are being handed. Who is quietly overlooked, and at what cost. What the money is actually for. A generation ago, little of this belonged in the conversation. Today it is often the best part of it. Clients raise these things with me without prompting, and I treat them as the work itself, not a detour from it. I would hesitate to call it a female gift. The old habit of sorting temperament into male and female has never held up well against real people, who differ far more within a gender than across it. I have known men who do this as naturally as any woman I have worked
with. None of it reflects a change in the nature of women or men, only in the room, which now has space for the whole conversation, because it is fundamentally better structured. Some of the most useful hours I spend now go to a woman working out what she wants the wealth to do within her own lifetime, a conversation that once would not have been thought to need an advisor at all.
I would not say the shift is complete. It is still uneven, still settling. But clients are learning to trust a decision shaped by several people over one settled by a single senior voice. When only one set of assumptions goes in, it is those assumptions that surface later as the problem, and this is widely acknowledged now. The women I work with tend to think in decades. Sooner or later, they ask what the wealth is worth, and then, more quietly, what it is for. More of them are asking it now, from both sides of the table, as owners and as advisors. None of it arrived by manifesto; it came one sensible decision at a time. The table is fuller than it once was. More voices shape decisions, more perspectives are counted, and the wealth itself is often put to better use. The room is different now. In my experience, that has made for better businesses, better families, and better decisions.
Key Takeaways
- Women increasingly take charge in business decision-making, shifting the dynamic at the advisory table.
- The confidence of women in handling finances grows when they formally assume responsibility for them.
- Advisors now engage in broader discussions about governance, ownership, and the role of women in wealth management.
- The conversation on wealth has transformed; it’s no longer just about dividing assets but defining responsibilities.
- The shift reflects a structural change in advisory roles, allowing room for comprehensive conversations on wealth and its purpose.
For more information contact Poonam Mirchandani at LGT Wealth India .
Subscribe to the Citywealth Weekly Newsletter to learn more about Private Wealth Management.
Read more:
Insurance Can Be Used to Complement a Trust Strategy | Citywealth News
Digital Assets and PPLI Explained | Citywealth News
Private Placement Life Insurance | Citywealth News
Fivelements unveils its next chapter as a global integrative wellbeing brand
Under GOCO Hospitality, the brand will debut its first new property in Koh Samui in 2027, with further expansion across Europe to follow.
An Evening with Leland Melvin
Retired NASA astronaut, engineer & NFL football player. Thursday, 10th September. Doors open at 5:30 p.m. Event begins at 6:15 p.m.